Do you want to know my clearest memory of this piece? My choir had scheduled it for a March 2013 concert; when we sang it through for the first time at rehearsal I suddenly realized that the woman who sat next to me was crying. The words had hit her like a ton of bricks—her fiancé had been killed in Vietnam, she said. And indeed the words are very emotional, even more so when you know their history.
The first of the three men associated with this piece was Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat who served as ambassador to the US starting in 1912 and who wrote a poem named “Urbs Dei”